Historic bilingual education archives come home to UTSA

Published 11:20 am, Tuesday, December 24, 2013

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Fourth-grade teacher Michael Peña, shown with Mission Academy students in 2012 when he was working on a master's degree in bilingual studies, might one day also have his bilingual work stored at UTSA's archives. less

Fourth-grade teacher Michael Peña, shown with Mission Academy students in 2012 when he was working on a master's degree in bilingual studies, might one day also have his bilingual work stored at UTSA's ... more

Photo: Express-News File Photo

Historic bilingual education archives come home to UTSA

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Nerds like me get a kick out of history. Air a documentary on the Roman Empire, Chicano artists of East L.A. or the French Revolution and I'll get to a TV.

I get just as excited about archives, especially when they contain history begging to be saved, organized, digitized and studied by future writers and researchers.

As an advocate for bilingual and English-language learners, the association has fought for a multilingual, multicultural society. It promotes policy, programs, research and professional development of the same.

Its archives got to San Antonio because so much related to bilingual education started here in the figure of Albar A. Peña, a dual U.S.-Mexican citizen who grew up in Falfurrias and was an early Mexican-American graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, where he also earned his Ph.D.

Born in 1931, Peña was the first director of the federal Bilingual Education Program from 1969 to 1973. He testified before Congress in support of the Bilingual Education Act and other legislation involving use of children's native languages in schools. His stamp is on all the initial training of the nation's bilingual teachers, the curriculum used and bilingual education experimental projects.

Peña also was the first president of NABE and first chairman of bicultural-bilingual studies at UTSA.

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“He was a national figure and came to UTSA when it was first being established,” Flores said.

In announcing the school's acquisition of the group's archives, immediate past president Rossana Ramirez Boyd noted the “roots and reasons” for placing them in UTSA's trust.

“Albar Peña had a long history of activism and vision for bilingual education,” she said in a news release. “His professional records alone consist of 16.2 feet of archival materials spanning more than 40 years, during which he served Texas and the nation in high-level positions of advocacy for bilingualism and biculturalism.”

The archive's inventory is now available online, but the intent is to digitize it eventually. It's housed in Special Collections at UTSA's HemisFair Park Campus, accessible to new generations of scholars and policymakers. To view it, contact special
collections@utsa.edu, or 210-458-2228.

The archive will show researchers that “Texas was at the forefront of bilingual education,” Flores said, and UTSA helped create some of the first certified teachers of it. Over the years, tens of thousands of them were produced at UTSA, she said.

Truth be told, though, many thoughtful and brave Texas teachers used Spanish in their classrooms, sometimes defying rules on their students' behalf.